Tech of the month: Long exposure

It is time for another edition of Tech of the month! In August, we will look at long exposures. As always, you are invited to follow along with your camera – also if it is a compact one.
Long exposures allow you to blur motion and to collect as much light as possible. They often yield unreal yet beautiful images with vibrant colors and a large depth of field.

But first of all, how long is ‘long:’? There is no definite answer but for the sake of simplicity, I will put the line at a second. I took the header image of this post, a picture of the Spreebogen in Berlin, former residence of the ministry of the interior, with an exposure time of 10 seconds!

You will notice that I took almost all pictures in this post at night. Unless you own a super-professional camera or the right filters, you will also have to take your pictures for this challenge after sunset or in other low-light conditions. Why? Because if I had taken the ame image with the same settings during the day, the result would have been an all-white photo.

At exposure times of a second or more, you will need a tripod or some other means of support for your camera to avoid camera shake. I often but not always use a small gorilla tripod. When I do not have it with me, I use a wall or my backpack instead.

When you have chosen your motive and steadied your camera, it is time to choose the right settings. If your camera has manual control or a shutter speed priority mode, you can set the desired exposure time directly. Keep the ISO setting as low as possible to be able to go to longer times.

Coffee with a 4 seconds exposure

With a compact camera, you might not have the same amount of control over your images. However, most compacts nowadays have scene modes. The ‘nighttime landscape’ one will be the one to choose for long exposures. I took the image below in this mode with a small compact. I recommend that you take pictures in different light conditions to learn where this scene mode is good and where it is not.Long exposure with a compact camera[Originally published in Two memories of San Francisco]

ToM is a monthly photo challenge. To participate, take a picture according the theme, and when you post the picture, create a pingback to this post to share your achievements with us. As always, you are also invited to submit your images to Lucile’s photo rehab, and we will list all in-time contributions at the end of next month’s challenge. There is no time limit to participate in the challenges in the archives and you will always be listed at the end of each challenge you completed.

For a more advanced challenge that also involves long exposures, be sure to check out Nalinki’s post about Available Light.

Last month’s topic was Black & White, and these are the contributions we received until today:

It’s very easy! All you need to do is take your pictures, make a new post with them and include a link to this post so that we will be notified automatically. Alternatively, you can also drop the link to your post in the comments here.

I guess the ISO setting is a matter of taste .. the lowest one will work best if achieving really slow shutter speeds is your priority, like it was for me here, but there are plenty of situations when a higher one will work better, especially if you do not have a tripod.

I love these shots. Long exposure is something I have experimented with while using a 35mm SLR and a large format camera. (Old school, not digital.) My most favorite photograph was taken at night at a local train station while a freight train was going by. There was the blur of the train, lots of street lights and other lighting, and faint images of what was on the other side of the train. That was what shocked me the most. The exposure was long enough to allow the camera to “see” between the cars and capture things on the other side of the track. I intended to purchase a digital camera this week, but my car decided it needed a new water pump.

I would love to see that image! I like that about long exposures too, that they sometimes capture effects that we did not even think of before. Sorry to hear about your car, I hope it will behave better in the future!

These are not my photos but from Perelincolors, who hosts the Tech of the Month here at the Photo Rehab, as well as in her blog. I agree that these are photos to be loved! I have been practicing long exposure with the Olympus because of her challenge.